Where a Little Dose of Leonardo Is Still a Lot

Morgan Show Spotlights Works From Biblioteca Reale

In 2003, the Metropolitan Museum mounted an exhibition of just under 100 drawings by Leonardo da Vinci and pulled in close to half a million visitors in just over two months. This fall, the Morgan Library & Museum is presenting a miniature — very miniature — version of that show called “Leonardo da Vinci: Treasures From the Biblioteca Reale, Turin,” and it, too, should generate serious traffic, particularly as it includes two outstanding items — a book and a drawing — that the Met didn’t have.

Leonardo is magnetic. Even if you know nothing about art, you probably know his name. And with him, scale is relative. On the one hand, he’s titanic, god-size, this painter-sculptor-draftsman-architect-inventor-writer who was also a self-taught physicist, botanist, zoologist, musician, moral philosopher and ballistics expert.

But he’s also human, our size. He was a chronic procrastinator; he was bad at languages; he was a left-hander who wrote in a quirky, backward script.

He was one of Western culture’s sublime geeks.

He seems to have lived in a state of perpetual brainstorming, as if life were a theoretical proposition to be tested daily.

Did he ever power down, take a vacation? Maybe, but his version of kicking back was our version of doing extra homework. His observational curiosity was unsleeping, and he carried notebooks everywhere. Anything that crossed his eye, from bugs to battlements, was worth dwelling on, sketching, writing about, thinking about, figuring out.

More than 4,000 drawings by him survive, in notebooks and on loose sheets, and, undoubtedly, they are a mere fraction of the number he produced in a career that ended only with his death, at 67. In a way, when it comes to drawings, seeing just a little bit of Leonardo can be almost as good as seeing a lot, if it’s the right little bit, which the Morgan show is. Organized by Per Rumberg, associate curator of drawings at the museum, it touches on representative aspects of the artist’s output and, by adding drawings by a few of his pupils, suggests the long vapor trail of his influence.

Of course, what the show can only hint at — no show can do more — is how Leonardo became the prodigy he was. He was born in 1452, the love child of a notary and a peasant woman in a nothing-special Tuscan town. He apprenticed in Florence with Andrea del Verrocchio, who would have provided him with a model of multitasking professionalism. By the time Leonardo moved to Milan in the 1480s to work for the Sforza family as artist, military architect and designer of festival floats, the polymath we know was fully formed.

Years later, he returned to Florence with the idea of possibly settling there, but he found himself competing for honors with a brash sensation named Michelangelo. The two were contracted to do facing murals in a hall in the Palazzo Vecchio. Michelangelo did a sketch and soon skipped town. Leonardo got down to work, but his impulse to experiment did him in. He cooked up a fancy oil-based fresco technique for the project, only to find that the paint wouldn’t dry and ran down the wall.

Restless, he went back to Milan, then did a short stint in Rome. He finally ended up in France as a court artist to King Francis I, who gave him some silly tasks, like designing a robotic lion. Leonardo died there in 1519, commissions still on the drawing board, his career already a myth.

The Morgan show, with its dark, subdued, cushioned atmosphere, focuses on two, ultimately indivisible sides of that career: Leonardo as scientist and as artist.

From the Biblioteca Reale come studies of equine anatomy and human musculature. Scrupulously observed, these drawings could all easily qualify as textbook illustrations; at the same time, they served as raw material for Leonardo’s painting, early and late.

All of his scientific studies are in some way about mechanics, how things are made, though the identity of the creator varies. In a drawing from the Morgan’s collection titled “Designs for a Maritime Assault Mechanism and a Device for Bending Beams,” man is the maker. In two drawings of dragonflies, from Turin — done at different times but cut-and-pasted to a single sheet — the fabricator is nature, which meant, in the Renaissance, God, though Leonardo never pushed that explanation. This may be one reason we’re comfortable with him: he comes across as an inquiring and agnostic secularist, though he wasn’t one. Even his religious paintings don’t feel spiritual in a conventional way; they’re more surreal than supernatural.

He brought his interests in nature and technology together in the extraordinary illustrated treatise called “Codex on the Flight of Birds,” which dates from around 1505 and is making its New York debut at the Morgan. Written in his lefty’s mirror script, it exhaustively describes the aerodynamics of avian flight, and simultaneously lays out a virtual how-to for giving humans wings.

The images of birds with which Leonardo peppers the text are at once exacting and charming: he draws whoosh lines around them to indicate the movement of air. But this record of observed fact is also a futuristic vision. After pages dense with data, it concludes with a prediction that one day “a great bird” will lift off from a mountaintop, “filling the universe with wonder, filling all literature with its fame, and with eternal glory the nest in which it was born.” The bird was a dreamed-of flying machine; its nest was his mind.

Nor was Leonardo’s interest in airborne phenomena restricted to science. The prize entry in the Morgan show is a portrait of an angel. More precisely, it’s the metalpoint drawing called “Head of a Young Woman,” which was probably done from life, as a study for the painting “The Virgin of the Rocks.”

The painting, which exists in two versions, is strange, spacey, with four serene figures — a Madonna and Child, a toddler John the Baptist, and an angel — placed in a kind of stalactite bower, a hallucinatory, vaguely hellish setting.

The face in the study is spacey, too: slightly androgynous, age uncertain (what would “young” mean here?), with the faintest hint of a smile (knowing and withholding, in that Mona Lisa way), and a sleepy, almost narcotic gaze. (The pupil of the left eye seems about to slide onto her face.)

Connoisseurs have been crazy about this image. Bernard Berenson declared it “one of the finest achievements of all draughtsmanship.” Kenneth Clark called it one of the most beautiful drawings in the world. It is certainly beautiful, though with a complicated, slippery beauty, very different from that of, say, Vermeer’s “Girl With a Pearl Earring,” with which the study shares features: a bust-length format, an over-the-shoulder pose and a viewer-engaging glance.

The women in both pictures are real and ideal. But where Vermeer’s figure, with its weight and sheen, seems to exist indisputably in our material world — this is why we love her so — Leonardo’s figure does not, or not entirely. She’s a person who is an angel, and an angel who is a person. And her real point of origin is the artist’s mind, that laboratory-studio where factual and ethereal merge. There, Leonardo inhaled ambiguity like oxygen, and exhaled the Leonardo Effect, which, even in small doses, pulls us in.

Correction: November 9, 2013

An art review on Friday about “Leonardo da Vinci: Treasures From the Biblioteca Reale, Turin,” at the Morgan Library & Museum in Manhattan, misstated the title held by the French ruler for whom Leonardo served as a court artist. He was King Francis I, not Emperor.

A version of this review appears in print on November 8, 2013, on page C38 of the New York edition with the headline: Where a Little Dose of Leonardo Is Still a Lot. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe